A frequent request when I do my mock-AMA posts is “why I should write She-Hulk, superhero lawyer” or commentary on legal issues in superhero comics. I will admit I am not terribly interested in the topic, for two reasons:

1.) The law is my job and this is fun and do you really want your job getting mixed into your fun?

2.) It’s a lot less applicable than people think.

Let me explain #2 for a bit because I think it might serve to illuminate. My daily duties as a lawyer are, of course, law-related, but more important in many ways is how I conduct myself as a lawyer – my provincial law society mandates that as counsel I be courteous, honest, and strive to uphold the law. (Matt Murdock, in particular, often violates the second of those mandates.) In American jurisdictions these tenets still exist but generally they are, I am given to understand, much more lax; here they are not. (Some lawyers will threaten you with a complaint to the law society when you make any comment that could be even construed as an insult. These people are pains to work against, to say the least.)

This is to say that although the legal system in Canada and America is adversarial, my experience with it does not lead itself naturally to superhero comics, where by definition the stories have to be very adversarial. She-Hulk’s Enemy Lawyer, by comics convention, has to be ruthless and efficient and probably not very nice, whereas in my practice I routinely give and receive compliments to the other side on their conduct. Law, done well, is the opposite of dramatic. You seek to make your preferred conclusion mundane.

But there is another aspect yet to why I would not want to write a She-Hulk series, which is that the law is fundamentally kind of boring in many ways. Dan Slott’s She-Hulk wasn’t about lawyering, when you get down to it: it was an adventure series using a relentlessly wacky law firm as a setting. Which is fine, it was a good comic, and the reason it was a good comic is because She-Hulk wasn’t doing hours upon hours of reading discovery notes and making a list of evidentiary points for and against her client, or spending hours telling a client how to conduct themselves upon the stand, or writing letters to opposing counsel promising to employ tactics which are thinly veiled legal threats but only if you understand why they’re threats. Super-dramatic courtroom moments are the exception, not the rule – even in court they’re still the exception. Court is frequently very boring to non-involved parties.

Practicing law, if you are doing it properly, is about paying attention to tiny details and assembling your client’s narrative in the best possible light for a judge (or other decision-maker) to assess: in short, it is leaving the actual climax of the story (the decision) to a third party. Which is how the system works, but that’s directly not what you want out of a good comic book adventure story: you want a story where She-Hulk makes her case so staggeringly obviously that holy crap, how could ANYBODY disagree with that? Which isn’t really about law, you see, and more to the point it should usually offer She-Hulk more opportunity to punch things, which is what we all want to read anyway.

So that’s why it’s not gonna happen. When I want to write comics, I want to write holy shit comics. Law is not about holy shit most of the time. Quite the reverse.

In American jurisdictions these tenets still exist but generally they are, I am given to understand, much more lax; here they are not. (Some lawyers will threaten you with a complaint to the law society when you make any comment that could be even construed as an insult. These people are pains to work against, to say the least.)

This just seems like a different, but not much better, failure of courtesy than what you’d find in America.

Now I can’t help but wonder if there are people who read your “Why I Should Write Dr. Strange” posts and come to the conclusion that you are a former medical doctor who is now a practicing Wiccan or something.

For those who don’t know, Jamie Madrox, a.k.a. the Multiple Man, is a mutant with the power to create duplicates of himself in response to physical impact. It’s an involuntary defense mechanism. The duplicates have all his memories, and he can reabsorb them at will on contact. When he does, he gains the memories of any experiences they had while separate. In recent years, he’s taken to sending them out for years at a time to learn many different skills and careers, and his ability has gained the disadvantage that the duplicates can randomly embody aspects of his personality. A duplicate of his depressive side, for example, is pretty useless in a fight.

So anyways, he’s a mutant superhero with the powers of super-research and being in many places at once, but that’s it. He’s used it as a private investigator, and it sounds even better for a law firm, whether the regular kind of a law firm of one.

When I first saw one of your “Why I should write Dr. Strange” columns, for some reason I read the title as “Why I should write TO Dr. Strange”. I don’t know whether you would be asking him for advice, or maybe you had been pen pals since 3rd grade, but I was disappointed when I got the plot outline of what seemed to be an awesome issue of Dr. Strange instead.

One of the storylines in Astro City involved a criminal defense attorney who established reasonable doubt with things like “Can you be sure you saw my client, and not a shapeshifter?” and “How do you know the victim was actually dead? If the victim came back to life, can my client really be guity of murder?”

Even assuming a world in which shapeshifters and non-permanent death bordered on mundane, how well would this fly in a real courtroom?

Really, it’s mostly a request for more “I Should Write X,” and She-Hulk/Daredevil/Manhunter just come up because hey, you’re a lawyer, and therefore you must like lawyering. I personally wasn’t that into the whole thing, but more I Should Write would be great.

As one of the primary suggesters, and a lawyer myself, I guess the Canadian happy-families lawyering isn’t as interesting for comics.

But yes, I’ll admit it’s 1/3rd a plea for “Why I Should Write”, 1/3rd a plea for someone, anyone, to go back to the She-Hulk of the early oughties, much referenced here, and 1/3rd a plea for a narrative companion to Law and the Multiverse, which suggests nuggets of story but does not follow them through.

For those still curious about law in comics, I would second the recommendation of Bob Ingersoll’s “The Law Is A Ass” column that ran in Comic Buyer’s Guide for a few years, handily archived here: http://www.worldfamouscomics.com/law/

"Some lawyers will threaten you with a complaint to the law society when you make any comment that could be even construed as an insult. These people are pains to work against, to say the least.)"

As a fellow Canadian lawyer, I would note that (at least in our jurisdiction) that “threatening to report someone to the Law Society” is itself a reportable offense. You’re supposed to either do it or not, not make threats to get your way.

That being said, it’s never a good idea to be insulting to a fellow lawyer, but vocally disapproving of their litigation-relevant tactics/behavior can certainly be done, with enough tact.